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- Verified Buyer
For many years, science fiction books focused about space travel, deep sea submarines, dinosaurs, aliens, and time travel. Gordon R. Dickson contributed to that classic genres since the 1950's. He is perhaps best known for his Childe Cycle, Dragon Knight, and Dorsai series. However, in my opinion, Wolf and Iron was his best book.Written in the 1980's and published in 1990, the book is about a nerdy mathematical sociologist in the aftermath of a societal breakdown that returned America to a lawless Iron Age. He decides to travel from his university town in Michigan to stay with his brother who lives on a ranch in Montana. A wolf befriends him on the way.We don't know what instigated the collapse of American society but the consequences were clear. The loss of society abetted the basest behaviors of humankind: killing, stealing, raping, enslaving, and dominating. Might is right and trust is dust. By comparison, wolves are better behaved and more trustworthy than humans.Jeebee Walthus left his town as his neighbors got crazier. He tied a roll of gold coins around his waste, rode an electric motorcycle powered by a portable solar panel, wore a compass and a watch with a 100-year battery, used a pair of opera glasses, and carried a 22-gauge rifle. From experience, he knew to avoid people but he needed food and wanted to trade for a larger gun.The post-collapse America had no electricity, no gasoline, no communication, no industry, and minimal technology. Pockets of armed communities survived. Jeebee met one such community, which tried to kill him for his electric motor cycle. During his escape, he liberates a wolf and a 30-21 rifle, both of which saved his life.Traveling cross-country at night by foot with Wolf, Jeebee happened across a cellar that has canned food and decided to stay there while watching the highway for somebody, anybody that he can trust. He lucked out when he encountered a relatively high-tech and heavily armed horse-drawn peddler wagon, run by a Paul, his daughter Merry, and loyal assistant Nick.They needed somebody to help to deal with the very dangerous world and invited Jeebee to join them. Jeebee traveled with them westward towards Montana. Wolf traveled in parallel with them. Jeebee fell in love with Merry and she with him. When they got to Wyoming, Jeebee left the wagon to go to Montana on his own while the peddler wagon turned south.Jeebee learned to ride and to take care of horses, to shoot and kill with a knife, and to be a blacksmith. He was mauled by a bear and somehow survived, realizing how fragile life is in the wilderness, where even a minor wound can kill you if it slows you down. He watched wild men attack and kill a family with children living in a ranch. He builds a shelter to survive the winter using materials scavenged from the ranch.The book's treatment of Wolf is not over-romanticized, including the times when Wolf licked his bear-inflicted wounds and regurgitated meat for him to eat. The temptation for the writer to depict and the reader to view wolves as noble super dogs is hard to resist but Gordon R. Dickinson succeeded to avoiding this. As pointed out in a preface, Gordon R. Dickinson did extensive research on wolves for the book.If Dickinson is correct, the time window for wolves to remain feral and to become socialized to humans is remarkably short. In order to remain feral and yet be socialized to humans, the wolf must have been reared for no less than 2 weeks by a mother wolf and then raised afterward by a human. The likelihood of finding another wolf like Wolf must be miniscule.Dickinson spent much time in the book describing the creation of a shelter that allowed survival in the cold winter, the craft of blacksmithing, and hunting. There is an authenticity to the descriptions that suggests that he did a great deal of research on surviving in snow country, making a crossbow, and delivering a baby. The book is clearly a labor of love.For readers who are interested in surviving wilderness with nothing but their bare hands and wits, this book may be a disappointment. Jeebee would not have survived if he did not have a gun and ammunition, compass, matches, knives, hatchets, horses, blankets, boots, antibiotics, and other modern tools. The book illustrates how difficult survival is, even with these tools.
